Wednesday, August 19, 2015

"What is a lecture?" From the Deseret News.

A colleague who's too dumb to be able to lecture anyone on anything other than how to wear his pants too high and how to leave cheese sandwiches in the faculty fridge too long, sent me an article this morning.

Here's some flava:

"I believe this is the most exciting time in all of human history. The fields of teaching, learning and technology are ripe for change. New technologies and learning designs of all sorts will emerge to support the incredible potential of human learning no longer bound down by the traditions of ancient practices such as the lecture."

16 comments:

For the love of Zarquon's pendulous dingleberries, this guy's cranium is so firmly lodged up his blastopore that he must have a window installed in his stomach so that he can see where he's going and not bump into things.

HA HA HA HA HA! That was satire, right? Not even a "teaching and learning consultant" can be that much of a fucking moron.

K-12 education is lousy with these consultant-hucksters and they all denounce lecturing. You know what they LURV, LURV, LURV, though? TED Talks. Which are lectures. Khan Academy, which is a collection of lectures. And wait for it...a quick YouTube search turned up some videos of Taylor Halverson.....You know what's coming, right? ..I don't even have to tell you..That Taylor Halverson..LECTURES for a living.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4FGlK2sHY

That's what kills me too. When we lecture, we're doddering old fossils with brittle yellowed notes rattling in our liver-spotted clutches. Tenure is the only thing standing between us and the glue factory.

This is, sadly, the standard line for too many teaching/learning "experts": "most professors are terrible, but I am enlightened, and will tell you how all those other professors can improve." Especially given their guidelines for treating students (with respect, encouragement, appreciation of existing strengths, etc. etc.), I've never understood why such experts feel the need to justify their own usefulness by throwing their colleagues under the bus. Would it kill them to begin with the premise that most professors care about, and are at least marginally competent at, teaching, but/and might be interested in learning about, and choosing among, new approaches (perhaps especially those recently developed/tested/used by their colleagues, which of course is the rub -- that would require the "consultant" to be an active teacher, which of course the best ones are).

I already knew all that shit about the printing press and so forth, and it is nothing but a huge straw man, so we can toss a large chunk of that article in the trash. Also, let's eliminate the chunk that equivocates on the meaning of "lecture". Lots of words have multiple meanings and connotations, such as "douchebag" and "bunghole". What's left is almost nothing in quantity and quality.

At my joint, whenever the Ass. Dean of Whatever gets all breathless about how we've got to "get out from behind the podium", etc. because "the lecture is dead", I remind them that the book didn't kill the lecture, and technology hasn't killed the book (yet). Our brains simply have not evolved as quickly as this other shiny stuff, and there is still a place for an individual imparting information to a group, which we keep doing because it fucking works. And because the Ass. Dean won't hire more faculty, which we would definitely need if we're to do more "small group work", what the fuck do they expect us to do?

This is not at all to claim that lecture should be run in the manner of pre-1450. Halvorson's evidence for his specious claim that we're still doing it that way seems to be his own narrow experience. Therefore, I can simply counter his evidence by stating that I NEVER experienced simply being read at in K-12, undergrad, or grad school, and that's not how I do it either. While I can't claim that my experience exemplifies the norm, Halvorson certainly cannot either, at least not without some kind of, uhhh, evidence.

It's not my main field, but my understanding is that SOME lectures dictated books verbatim. But also, students could rent books by the chapter and then copy them. I think most lectures involved the professor "glossing" a text, or providing interpretation? I defer to my medieval colleagues on that. But as you say, OPH, "Lecture" has many different meanings.

At my college, we hear "Don't be the sage on the stage, be the guide at the side." But the institution doesn't back up that up in practice-Lab classes are paid at a lower rate than "Lecture courses" some classes you meet for 2 hours but get paid for one. I have a three hour lab that I get two credits for. It is almost totally active learning, data gathering, problem solving, experiential learning (with technology to boot!). But it is clearly valued as "Less" than a typical "Lecture" course.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.